This thing is pretty much amazing....lotta stuff going on with all the filters. Its an experimenter's dream no doubt. I love to work with my Ultra Proteus. I used to have a Morpheus but it only had half as many sounds and were not as usable. The Ultra Proteus is loaded with exotic flavors. You can still get the cards for it too on eBay. I have a couple. They are also worth seeking out. Great machine.

Rating: 5 out of 5
posted Friday-Jul-12-2002 at 04:45

TheRain
a hobbyist user
from USA
writes:

This is my first hardware synth. I've been using Propellerheads Reason soft synth for quite a while. I don't really like reason much so I decided to give this Ultra Proteus a go after reading through it's manual and getting an idea of what it was capable of.

In short, I'm very impressed. This thing is pretty old and the samples are a tad outdated, but you can use it for seriouse tone creation. I mean, I can think up a noise in my head and after a bit of expirimentation with wave combinations, filters, LFO's and function generators, I can turn the sound into reality.

I do have emagic's sounddiver 3.0 software for editing presets though. This makes a HUGE difference, get it if you can. New synth users like myself, sometimes you don't realize how much power you will loose in creativity just by the amount of time it takes to change settings. That is very true for this sythesizer. There are far too many filters to mess with, which is probably part of the reason Emu's more recent modules have only a fraction of the filters available in this module.

Thought #2: my only prob with this synth is that the realistic "chimey" and "strings" sounds aren't nearly as beautiful or striking as I would hope. The new proteus 2000 line of synths have much better timbres in this regard. I use this thing mainly for weird sounds though. Drum sounds are OK.

Pick up an Xtreme Lead-1 or an Audity 2000 if you are really into weird noises and can spare a couple extra hundred dollars. The difference will be large enough to justify the cost. The morpheus is really cool too, for about the price of an Ultra Proteus used.

Rating: 5 out of 5
posted Tuesday-Feb-19-2002 at 20:02

Rob
a professional user
from UK
writes:

The Ultra Proteus has many excellent sounds in it, and the factory demo songs do not do it justice. There are 6 ROM card for this module each one providing 128 new presets and 64+ hyperpresets. These cards are really well programmed. Whilst the cards are obsolete, you can download the SysEx files for 4 of these cards, in native and Sound Diver format from The Emulator Archive (www.emulatorarchive.com). Enjoy.

Rating: 5 out of 5
posted Saturday-Aug-11-2001 at 09:37

chuckiev
a hobbyist user
from US of A
writes:

After some time programming it, this synth deserves a 5 and a half. I've been able to emulate many wavestation and prophet vs wavetable like sounds on this beast (by my own patchmaking of course, the presets are worthless). Don't knock it until you program it. I'll shortly post up a patchbank I made.

Rating: 5 out of 5
posted Tuesday-May-01-2001 at 10:44

chuckiev
a hobbyist user
from US of A
writes:

This machine should've been called the Ultra Morpheus-its built exactly the same except theres twice the filters and PCM samples (though missing some pcm samples the morpheus has). For those unfamiliar the sound of this synth's been described as "somewhere inbetween a wavestation and waldorf xt". I've never used any proteus modules before and was very impressed at the quality of some of the samples, most especially the piano. And with those z-plane filters you can make the piano sound like wind chimes on acid. Definitely the best quality old rompler that I've ever heard, I just got it to replace my sold morpheus (sadly) and am very happy. Only complaints.. some tedious editing if you want to do it from the front panel-though not as painful as some rack synths. What makes it hard is the sheer number of parameters there are. Properly editing the function generators is damn near impossible without using something like sounddiver. Get one if you have the chance.. its more than just a cheap rompler its a full fledged synthesizer. I believe if e-mu had built the morpheus and ultra proteus as keyboards with knob and slider programming they would still sell for thousands today-but you can pick up one of these babies dirt cheap for $300-400. You'll want to make your own patches so I hope you're up for the learning curve on that, if you are good you can get some amazing sounds.